The Grief of Others and the Boasts of Candidates

Here’s a what-if that continues to haunt me. What if some disturbed
“lone wolf,” “inspired” by the Islamic State’s
online propagandists, went out with an assault rifle or two and – San Bernardino-style
– shot up a wedding, killing the
bride and killing or wounding many others at the ceremony? Let’s
posit as well the sort of casualties that did come out of the San Bernardino
attack: 14 dead and 22 wounded. It doesn’t take a prophet or a media
expert to know what the results would be: steroidal San Bernardino-style coverage
24/7 that would go on for weeks. It would be the horror story of the century.
We would experience the tears, the accounts of wounded survivors, the funerals,
the testimony of grief counselors, families in pain, and of course endless interviews
with TV terror experts and pundits of every sort. You can imagine the
role it would play in any future presidential campaign debates, what politicians
in Washington would say, and so on. The thirst for revenge over such an
act would be unquenchable. It would be seen, to chose a word Donald Trump
has favored, as yet another revelation of the thoroughly “medieval”
nature of our enemies (though with weaponry that was anything but).

And yet here’s the thing that, after all these years, continues to puzzle
me: such a wedding slaughter has indeed occurred. In fact, it’s
happened again and again in the twenty-first century – just with a somewhat
different cast of characters, next to no media coverage, and just about no one
in the United States paying the slightest attention. I’m speaking
about the eight times between
December
2001 and December
2013 when U.S. Air Force planes or, in one case, an American drone attacked
wedding parties in three countries in the Greater Middle East – Afghanistan,
Iraq, and Yemen – slaughtering brides, grooms, bridal parties, and scores
of revelers. By my rough count (and it speaks volumes that TomDispatch
is the only place in these years which has even tried to keep
track of or count up these deaths), almost 300 Afghans, Iraqis, and Yemenis
died in these slaughters, including in one case even the musicians
playing at the wedding. Since 2013, two more wedding
parties have been eviscerated,
again to next to no notice here – both in Yemen by the U.S.-backed Saudi
air force in its indiscriminate air war against Houthi rebels.

In our world, despite the fact that most of these weddings were clearly targeted
“by mistake,” with not a terrorist suspect in sight, no conclusions
are drawn. None of it is considered “medieval.” None of it counts
as “barbaric.” (Only one of the eight incidents, in which a number
of children died, even resulted in an official American apology.)
None of it is worth 24/7 coverage for weeks, or any significant coverage at
all. Can there be a more striking record of how little the deaths of civilians
in Washington’s endless war on terror have fazed Americans or how little
such deaths and the feelings of the grieving parents, siblings, children, relatives,
friends, and neighbors left
behind have been on the American mind? Few here seem to find any of this
strange. That’s why TomDispatch
regular Mattea Kramer’s piece today particularly speaks to me. She
is the rare soul who finds an equivalency between our natural feelings of grief
and loss and horror at the slaughter of American civilians, of those we care
for, and the deaths of the distant victims of our wars. ~ Tom

Killing Someone Else’s BelovedPromoting the American Way of War in Campaign 2016
By Mattea Kramer

The crowd that gathered in an airplane hangar in the desert
roared with excitement when the man on stage vowed to murder women and children.

It was just another Donald Trump campaign event, and the candidate had affirmed
his previously made pledge not only to kill terrorists but to “take
out” their family members, too. Outrageous as that might sound,
it hardly distinguished Trump from most of his Republican rivals, fiercely
competing
over who will commit the worst war crimes if elected. All the chilling claims
about who will preside over more killings of innocents in distant lands –
and the thunderous applause that meets such boasts – could easily be
taken as evidence that the megalomaniacal billionaire Republican front-runner,
his various opponents, and their legions of supporters, are all crazytown.

Yet Trump’s pledge to murder the civilian relatives of terrorists could
be considered quite modest – and, in its bluntness, refreshingly candid
– when compared to President Obama’s ongoing policy of loosing
drones and U.S. Special Operations forces in the Greater Middle East.
Those policies, the assassinations that go with them, and the “collateral
damage” they regularly cause are based on one premise when it comes
to the American public: that we will permanently suspend our capacity for
grief and empathy when it comes to the dead (and the living) in distant countries.

Classified documents
recently leaked to the Intercept by a whistleblower describe the
“killing
campaign” carried out by the CIA and the Pentagon’s Joint
Special Operations Command in Yemen and Somalia. (The U.S. also conducts drone
strikes in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya; the leaked documents
explain how President Obama has institutionalized the practice of striking
outside regions of “active hostilities.”) Intelligence personnel
build a case against a terror suspect and then develop what’s termed
a “baseball card” – a condensed dossier with a portrait of
the individual targeted and the nature of the alleged threat he poses to U.S.
interests – that gets sent up the chain of command, eventually landing
in the Oval Office. The president then meets with more than 100 representatives
of his national security team, generally on a weekly basis, to determine just
which of those cards will be selected picked for death. (The New
York Times has vividly described
this intimate process of choosing assassination targets.)

Orders then make their way down to drone
operators somewhere in the United States, thousands of miles from the
individuals slated to be killed, who remotely pilot the aircraft to the location
and then pull the trigger. But when those drone operators launch missiles
on the other side of the world, the terrifying truth is that the U.S. “is
often unsure who will die,” as a New York Timesheadline
put it.

That’s because intel on a target’s precise whereabouts at any
given moment can be faulty. And so, as the Timesreported,
“most individuals killed are not on a kill list, and the government
does not know their names.” In 2014, for instance, the human-rights
group Reprieve, analyzing what limited
data on U.S. drone strikes was available, discovered that in attempts to kill
41 terror figures (not all of whom died), 1,147 people were killed.
The study found that the vast majority of strikes failed to take down the
intended victim, and thus numerous strikes were often attempted on a single
target. The Guardianreported
that in attempts to take down 24 men in Pakistan – only six of whom were
eventually eliminated in successful drone strikes – the U.S. killed an
estimated 142 children.

Apparently you and I are meant to consider all those accidental killings
as mere “collateral
damage,” or else we’re not meant to consider them at all.
We’re supposed to toggle to the “off” position any sentiment
of remorse or compassion that we might feel for all the civilians who die
thanks to our country’s homicidal approach to keeping us safe.

I admit to a failing here: when I notice such stories, sometimes buried deep
in news reports – including the 30 people killed, three of them children,
when U.S. airpower “accidentally” hit
a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, last October; or
the two women and three children blasted
to smithereens by U.S. airpower last spring at an Islamic State checkpoint
in northern Iraq because the pilots of two A-10 Warthogs attacking the site
didn’t realize that civilians were in the vehicles stopped there; or
the innumerable similar incidents that have happened with remarkable regularity
and which barely make it into American news reports – I find I can’t
quite achieve the cold distance necessary to accept our government’s
tactics. And for this I blame (or thank) my father.

To understand why it’s so difficult for me to gloss over the dead,
you have to know that on December 1, 2003, a date I will never forget nor
fully recover from, I called home from a phone booth on a cobblestone street
in Switzerland – where I was backpacking at the time – and learned
that my Dad was dead. A heart attack that struck as suddenly as a Hellfire
missile.

Standing in that sun-warmed phone booth clutching the receiver with a slick
hand, vomit gurgling up at the back of my throat, I pressed my eyes closed
and saw my Dad. First, I saw his back as he sat at the broad desk in his home
office, his spot of thinning hair revealed. Then, I saw him in his nylon pants
and baseball cap, paused at the kitchen door on his way to play paddle tennis.
And finally, I saw him as I had the last time we parted, at Boston’s
Logan Airport, on a patch of dingy grey carpet, as I kissed his whiskered
cheek.

A few days later, after mute weeping won me a seat on a fully booked trans-Atlantic
flight, I stood in the wan light of early December and watched the employees
of the funeral home as they unloosed the pulleys to lower Dad’s wooden
box into the ground. I peered down into that earthen hole, crying and sweating
and shivering in the stinging cold, and tried to make sense of the senseless:
Why was he dead while the rest of us lived?

And that’s why, when I read about all the innocent civilians we’ve
been killing over the years with the airpower that presidential candidate
Ted Cruz calls “a blessing,”
I tend to think about the people left behind. Those who loved the people we’ve
killed. I wonder how they received the news. (“We’ve had a tragedy
here,” my Mom told me.) I wonder about the shattering anguish they surely
feel at the loss of fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, children, friends.
I wonder what memories come to them when they squeeze their eyes closed in
grief. And I wonder if they’ll ever be able to pick up the pieces of
their lives and return to some semblance of normalcy in societies that are
often shattering around them. (What I don’t wonder about, though, is
whether or not they’re more likely to become radicalized – to hate
not just our drones but our country and us – because the answer to that
is obvious.)

Playing God in the Oval Office

“It’s the worst thing to ever happen to anyone,” actor
Liam Neeson recently wrote
on Facebook. He wasn’t talking about drone strikes, but about the fundamental
experience of loss – of losing a loved one by any means. He was marking
five years since his wife’s sudden death. “They say the hardest
thing in the world is losing someone you love,” he added. I won’t
disagree. After losing her husband, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl
Sandberg posted
about “the brutal moments when I am overtaken by the void, when the
months and years stretch out in front of me, endless and empty.” After
her husband’s sudden death, author Joan Didion described grief as a
“relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the
experience of meaninglessness itself.”

That squares with the description offered by a man in Yemen who had much
of his extended family blown away by an American drone at his wedding. “I
felt myself going deeper and deeper into darkness,” the man later told
a reporter. The drone arrived just after the wedding party had climbed into
vehicles strewn with ribbons to escort the bride to her groom’s hometown.
Everyone’s belly was full of lamb and it was dusk. It was quiet. Then
the sky opened, and four missiles rained down on the procession, killing 12.

U.S. airpower has hit a bunch of other weddings,
too. And funerals.
And clinics.
And an unknown and unknowable number of family homes.
The CIA’s drone assassination campaign in the tribal regions of Pakistan
even led a group of American and Pakistani artists to install an enormous
portrait of a child on the ground in
a frequently targeted region of that country. The artists wanted drone operators
to see the face of one of the young people they might be targeting, instead
of the tiny infrared figures on their computer consoles that they colloquially
refer to as “bugsplats.”
It’s an exhortation to them not to kill someone else’s beloved.

Once in a while a drone operator comes forward to reveal the emotional and
psychic burden of passing 12-hour shifts in a windowless bunker on an Air
Force base, killing by keystroke for a living. One serviceman’s six
years on the job began when he was 21 years old and included a moment when
he glimpsed
a tiny figure dart around the side of a house in Afghanistan that was the
target of a missile already on its way. In terror, he demanded of his co-pilot,
“Did that look like a child to you?” Feverishly, he began tapping
messages to ask the mission’s remote observer – an intelligence
staffer at another location – if there was a child present. He’ll
never know the answer. Moments later, the missile struck the house, leveling
it. That particular drone operator has since left the military. After his
resignation, he spent a bitterly cold winter in his home state of Montana
getting blackout drunk and sleeping in a public playground in his government-issued
sleeping bag.

Someone else has, of course, taken his seat at that console and continues
to receive kill orders from above.

Meanwhile Donald Trump and most of the other Republican candidates have been
competing over who can most successfully obliterate combatants as well as
civilians. (Ted Cruz’s comment
about carpet-bombing ISIS until we find out “if sand can glow in the
dark” has practically become a catchphrase.) But it’s not just
the Republicans. Every single major candidate from both parties has plans
to maintain some version of Washington’s increasingly far-flung drone campaigns.
In other words, a program that originated under President George W. Bush as
a crucial part of his “global war on terror,” and that was further
institutionalized
and ramped
up under President Obama, will soon be bequeathed to a new president-elect.

When you think about it that way, election 2016 isn’t so much a vote
to select the leader of the planet’s last superpower as it is a tournament
to decide who will next step into the Oval Office and have the chance to play
god.

Who will get your support as the best candidate to continue killing the loved
ones of others?